William Moritz – { feuilleton }

Every so often I go looking for more of the documentaries about avant-garde cinema that Keith Griffiths produced for Channel 4 (UK) in the 1980s and 1990s. Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music (1992) is one I’d been after for a while but it took some time to finally surface in searches as a result of the uploader misspelling the name of its subject. Film historian William Moritz describes Fischinger’s films as “visual music”, a term which has since become more widely applied to abstract cinema although not all abstract films have musical scores. Fischinger was a pioneer in this area, not necessarily the first but a film-maker who in the 1930s pushed his techniques to a peak of complexity far beyond anything being attempted elsewhere. The acclaim for his short films attracted the attention of Paramount, MGM and Disney but Hollywood typically didn’t allow him to do the things he was best at once he’d been hired. As I’ve said before, Fischinger’s tests for the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor section of Fantasia were rejected as “too dinky” by the creator of an anthropomorphic cartoon mouse.

Griffiths’ documentary ought have been twice as long as its 25 minutes but at least it was commissioned and broadcast. The interviewees are the aforementioned Moritz and Fischinger’s widow, Elfriede, who helped create some of the films and talks a little about her husband’s techniques. Half the running time is taken up with extracts from the films but the video quality does these no favours (and the picture is too damned dark…uploaders: adjust your gamma!), you’d be better off looking for copies of the complete films elsewhere. More from Moritz’s interview session turned up a year later in Griffiths’ Abstract Cinema, an excellent history of the form which, of course, included Fischinger’s films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger

Good to see this documentary turn up at last even if it is on a private YouTube channel affiliated to a site that hosts cinematic rarities. Abstract Cinema was made in 1993 for Channel 4 (UK) at the tail end of the period when the channel could be relied upon to screen resolutely uncommercial fare. The documentary was another production by Keith Griffiths, producer of many films with the Brothers Quay, and producer/director of a number of documentaries such as this, exploring the cinematic zones that television seldom acknowledges.

I’ve mentioned this programme a few times before because I taped it at the time, and still regard it as an excellent introduction to an idiom that many enthusiasts consider to be the purest form of cinema, as opposed to the theatrical storytelling that dominates the medium. Peter Greenaway has complained for years about the formulaic nature of contemporary feature films yet his own films, which are supposed to be an alternative to what he calls “dominant cinema”, aren’t so very different from the Hollywood norm in their reliance on actors, narratives, sets and the like. Abstract cinema avoids all of these things. Stan Brakhage is one of the filmmakers interviewed, and his own productions not only shunned sound, they even shunned the camera when he was painting directly onto the film strip. At the time of Griffiths’ interview Brakhage was doing this again using the comparatively larger canvas of Imax stock.

Griffiths’ documentary runs through the history of cinematic abstraction, from Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye (both the subjects of earlier Griffiths studies) to the 1990s when several of the interviewees had taken to programming computers to create their visuals. Griffiths made his documentary at just the right time. As well as having access to a TV channel that would present such work to an audience (albeit late at night), he was also able to interview a number of the leading practitioners while they were still around; in addition to Brakhage there’s John Whitney, Jules Engel, Pat O’Neill, Malcolm le Grice, Michael Scroggins and Vibeke Sorensen. Notably absent is Jordan Belson, possibly because he’s always been reluctant to discuss the production process that created his ethereal imagery, although film historian William Moritz discusses Belson’s work while guiding us through the history. What you don’t get here is the additional 25 minutes of abstract films that were broadcast after the documentary, an unprecedented event, and one that wouldn’t be repeated.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive